This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. For more stories from WIRED's China issue, click here.

Eric Pan has a mission: to democratise manufacturing. His plan? To make it open-source and small-scale. His 270-person company, Seeed Technology, based in Shenzhen near the Liuxiandong metro station, helps makers turn their ideas into products, such as the RePhone - a $39 modular 3G smartphone that exploded on Kickstarter last year.

ADVERTISEMENT

A worker applies a small component, such as an LED, from a tape strip on a reel

Jonathan Leijonhufvud

"Today, lots of people are home-brewing their devices as they might do their beer," explains Pan, 32. "It's our mission at Seeed to give these makers access to supply chains, tools, processes and materials."

READ NEXT

Could Mastodon be the social network to replace Twitter?

The seven-year-old business grew out of the Arduino movement: its first product was an accelerometer sensor module. Today, it helps small-scale makers with R&D, manufacturing, distribution and workshops. "Our three Ps are prototype, produce and promote," Pan says. "And everything we do is based on open-source hardware. It makes things far faster, easier and cheaper."

ADVERTISEMENT

READ NEXT

Canonical hack exposes private data of 2 million forum members

When WIRED visits, a factory area is making circuit boards and sensor units in lots of 80 to 10,000, with "cells" of three to five people who test, assemble and package each product.

This is a case rack for microchips. They are being used by "Loovee", an application engineer who is building an Arduino-controlled toy car - its recipe can be found on seeedstudio.com

Jonathan Leijonhufvud

ADVERTISEMENT

"The factory floor produces 30 product ranges a day, and it takes 15 minutes to swap manufacturing to a new product," Pan says. "The future of manufacturing will be more guerrilla style - people working in small teams like this, with semi-automatic tools."

The advantage: speed and flexibility. "Where PCH International focuses on 100,000 pieces, we focus on fewer than 1,000," Pan says. "In the future, it's the demand chain, not the supply chain, that will matter. And maybe there will be no shipping, as manufacturing will happen near your street."

Seeed is building decentralised manufacturing operations in Tokyo and Berlin; it's already in California. "You have local restaurants when you want to eat quickly," says Pan. "Why shouldn't manufacturing be the same?"

This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine